Entertainment in a Glance

Street Kings is based on a story by bestseller crime writer James Ellroy (Black Dahlia, White Jazz, LA Confidential), a brooding cynic who experienced his mother's gruesome, unsolved murder when he was ten years old, and the LA based scribe has been attempting to overcome that childhood trauma through his noirish violent fiction ever since. Keanu Reeves is Tom Ludlow in Street Kings, an alcoholic Vice Squad cop whose police methods amount to outright brutality and legal assassinations that have long been covertly approved and elaborately covered up by his boss, the suave and cunning Captain Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker).

When Ludlow's former partner is targeted for investigation by Internal Affairs and seeks to worm his way out of it by snitching on Ludlow's blatant improprieties, he starts stalking the turncoat. And while doing so, inadvertently walks into a Koreatown grocery store robbery shootout in which Ludlow is implicated in his ex-partner's murder there. So when the Internal Affairs heat is turned on him, Ludlow plays the artful dodger with a little help from the captain, at the same time as he roams through the shark infested waters of inner city LA, on the hunt for the dead man's killers and in a bid for his own exoneration.

But while prowling around all over town for the bad guys, the vodka-swilling Ludlow becomes increasingly less distinguishable from the targeted perpetrators, as he performs summary executions, impales and tortures a suspect on a barbed wire fence, severs a head in two with a well aimed shovel, and beats brains in with a telephone book and then drinks their beer from the fridge. And whenever the one man good squad sustains any related bruises, he stops off at the local hospital for some personal attention from sexy Nurse Garcia (Martha Higareda), who has a habit of applying bandages like it's professional foreplay between the two lovebirds.

Street Kings is plagued most of all by terrible miscasting. Keanu, a self-described pacifist and on the sensitive, gentle side, is no Denzel Washington, and his label here as a similar out of control psycho-cop is hard to swallow. And Forest Whitaker, for his part, struggles with seeming confusion to get into overly grandiose character as if he wandered in from either There Will be Blood imitating Daniel Day Lewis' maniacal oil baron, or a Shakespeare production, all while cultivating some sort of bad New York City accent.